1) We are happy with our DRX-400. We bought it when Inova wasn't
available so it was an easy choice. I believe that the spectrometers
are becoming more and more reliable. Our users tend to like the
Bruker software just as well as the Varian (we also have a VXR-300),
and collect data just as fast. Bruker has more places to look and
adjust when initially setting up an experiment. The Varian on-line
pulsesequence library is handy and the sequences usually work without
a lot of adjustments. Varian also makes it easy to array and display
arrayed experiments. The Bruker board swap policy with no restocking
fees is great. They may not always be new boards, but they will
throw a nearly unlimited supply of them at you.
2)
Everyone will have different experiences and different opinions regarding
the major venders system. We recently installed two new Varian console on
Bruker magnets and have been reasonably pleased with both systems. The
Mercury 400 has some intermittent problems that causes it to stop on long
term acquisitions and magnet homogeniety (existing magnet) also needs to be
addressed. The Inova 500 works as well as expected and I have been very
pleased with its performance. However, We did have to wait awhile for a 10mm
bb probe.
I worked a Purdue University for seven years prior to coming down here.
Most of the systems at Purdue were Varian and we found them to be mostly
reliable, user freindly, flexible and capable. I have had some exposure to
later Bruker systems and we have two older Bruker systems here at USC. From
what I have seen the Brukers could do what the Varians can and the newer
software has many simialarities to the Varian. For testing purposes I still
think the Varian "array" capabilites exceed the Bruker equivanent but I am
sure you can get the job done with the Brukers.
I think that you need to examine your requirements and bring good
representative samples with you to a demo of each system. Also remeber that
the demo can be a test of the app lab chemist and you don't want to judge a
system on the basis of how good the operator is. Try to get your hands on
the system and judge the results.
3)We brought an INOVA400 last year. It works very well.
But the low frequency is not so well (under 40 MHz).
4) Hello, we just got 600, 400 and 300 narrow bore high resolution liquid
NMR instruments from Varian. I would say that instrument quility should
be about same for Varian and Bruke. So final decision is mostly depends
on the price!
5) We have a 500 mHz Varian Inova spectrometer which we purchased in 1995.
We have been very happy with Varian's products and service. The engineers
are professional, helpful, and quick. They take us seriously and are not
condescending or pushy in any way. The software interface is fairly
intuitive and friendly, and has some nice features that I haven't seen on
any non-Varian spectrometer, like the "wti" function, which allows you to
apply different weighting functions and see how they are affecting the
spectrum instantly. The software is very user configurable, and can be
programmed to be almost "idiot proof" and "black box" (just click on the
experiment and click on "go" or whatever). On the other hand, we are
still allowed the freedom to do a fair amount of meddling and programming
on our own, if we choose (we do). The format that the data is stored in
is fairly portable and can be easily imported by almost any data
processing software package out there.
In general, the software (vnmr) is fairly robust. Of course there will be
bugs with any software, that's the nature of the game, but Varian is very
open about problems that do arise and very quick to suggest work-arounds
or provide installable fixes. They have a newsletter (distributed through
e-mail or on paper) which is informative and tends to encourage a feeling
of community with other Varian users. Check out their web site,
www.nmr.varian.com for more info if you want to. I would strongly
recommend a Varian spectrometer to anyone in the market for a new system.
The spectrometer hardware has been very reliable, and anything that has
become faulty is prompt fixed. The maintenance contract is fantastic, if
you choose to go that route.. Varian provides some really easy to use
software for diagnosing problems, too - you can put the spectrometer
through a hardware check in less than 1/2 an hour, to make sure all the
boards are coming up, configured correctly, etc. The magnet itself seems
to be designed well.. we haven't had any problems at all when servicing
it, installing probes, tuning or doing any other routine activity.
My one word of caution is beware of some of the systems they market as
their "lower end" alternatives, like the gemini 2000 and mercury
spectrometers - be careful that they have the features that you need.
There is an extremely steep cliff in terms of features and options, with
those vs. inovas and unity spectrometers (of course, they're also
cheaper). They may indeed be the perfect solution for many lab or
teaching situations, but I could easily imagine someone buying one and
then realizing "hey, I can't shim, or supress water, or compile this pulse
sequence, or ..!". My advice would be to give each vendor a chance to
prove their instrument to you, make sure they can show you that they can
do the exact kinds of experiments you foresee wanting to do, and don't
skimp on important features that will be harder to add later or things
that are cheap overall (like RAM for the computer and disk space, CD ROM
drive, etc. for the computer).
Asking other people is a great way to get a good feel for the companies
you're dealing with. We've been very happy with Varian. In general,
folks at Varian are respectful, courteous, prompt, sincere, and have a
good sense of humor.
6) Our facility accomplished upgrading of old Ge 500 MHZ system with new
Bruker DRX console and Nalorac probes.
You can read more details about spectrometer at our home page.
We are pretty pleased with our choice.
My comments are as follow:
on hardware reliability- yes it is reliable
performance so far so good
software fast and modern software running on SGI
user-friendliness- yes it is user friendly
service very good but I arrange most of my problems with service eng. who
instaled the console
7) we have just finished the evaluation of NMR companies in connection
with the purchase of NMR equipment (200 / 400 / 600 MHz new,
250 / 400 MHz upgrade) at the University of Vienna. Companies were
judged with respect to performance, cost, service, etc. in a very detailed
way, including two-day testing both at Palo Alto and Karlsruhe.
We think that at the moment both Bruker and Varian provide equal
quality in every respect (with small advantages for one or the other
company with respect to details which, by the way, are hard to classify
in an objective manner: experienced programmers will like Varian's open
software concept more, routine users might be fond of Bruker's user-
friendly interface, ...; in fact, a matter of taste). Our final decision was
therefore based more or less on the price alone.
Jeol did not even submit an offer, and I certainly would not buy a Jeol
instrument in Europe in any case because of the bad support. This might
be different un the US, however.
8) 1. We got much better applications/demo/sales help from Varian
than from Bruker. Although not the most important point in
our evaluation, there was enough difference to make us believe
Varian might well deliver better support down the line. For
our current equipment, we have seen similar interactions:
Varian has been _much_ better with applications support; the two
companies have been comparable with service issues, although
in some instances Bruker has been easier to deal with (e.g.,
board swaps). Varian's autotest procedures will be helpful
will facility maintenance/checks. The sales help was important
in that we had better confidence that we were asking for the
best configuration of equipment.
2. Varian bid better line shapes than Bruker; we felt more
confident with Varian's field mapping procedures (RRI
based) than Bruker's installation procedures.
3. Our judgement was that Varian's software was clearly superior
in ease-of-use for data acquisition. This was an important
point for our large user group. We did not evaluate GLIDE
versus ICON-NMR, since we decided early on to not use this
software for the instrument being purchased. We felt Bruker
had some advantages with some analysis functions in the
software, and a bigger advantage with plotting. There was
some belief that analysis/plotting issues would be short-term,
whereas the ease-of-use issues might not (due to intrinsic
design issues of the software).
4. We believed Bruker hardware might have some advantages over the
Varian design, but the demo data did not confirm this. On a
number of important tests, Varian either did as well or better
than Bruker. Overall, we ended up having a mixed score (tie)
on hardware issues.
5. Varian's documentation is clearly superior to Bruker's for
users learning/reference and administrative software support.
6. Probes were also a mixed bag. One issue that did stand out,
however, was Varian was much more flexible in discussing
possibilities of incorporating Nalorac probes, and worked
hard to show the capabilities of their own probes (very
competitively priced). Bruker attempted to exclude Nalorac by
offering a "package" price. We ended up getting Nalorac and
Varian probes with the final purchase of an INOVA spectrometer.
9)Software on the DPX400 (the spectrometer is 2 years old -A.K.) is very
complex. All signals are digitised as soon as possible and subsequent
processing is carried out by autonomous computers in each functional unit
of the spectrometer. Overall control comes from a UNIX workstation under
the control of the operator, in our case a Bruker Aspect Station.
Communication between the Aspect Station and the spectrometer is by private
ethernet.
The main operating program in the Aspect Station, XWINNMR (formerly UXNMR),
is of poor quality. Its main operating principles are awkward,
unconventional and often counterintuitive. A number of visitors to our
lab. have described them as bizarre. Many of the problems with it seem to
originate in the need for the software to be easy for the programmers to
write, while others are clearly the result of carelessness. It is quite
evident that there is no general policy with regard to programming style
and user interface design. We have been advised that the program fails to
conform to the sections of EU Directive 90/270/EEC, ISO 9241, and BS 7179,
all of which are concerned with the ease of use of computer software. The
Aspect Station computer is also underpowered for the task it is required to
do. It uses UNIX and X-Windows to provide the graphical user interface
(GUI), a combination that is notorious for its high computing power
requirement. The simplest dialogue box can take over thirty seconds to
open; menus sometimes take twenty seconds to drop from the menubar; the
pointer is often frozen on the screen for five or ten seconds.
The most serious functional fault in XWINNMR is that no check for data
accumulation overflow is made. This means that when signals collected from
the spectrometer have been added together such that the largest digitised
value equals the largest value that can be stored in the acquisition
memory, no action is taken and further acquisition results in the data
becoming unusable. This appalling and extraordinary omission is admitted
by Bruker, but was not intimated to us before purchase. We discovered it
during the normal course of work, and no solution has yet been supplied.
The syntax of the pulse programming language changed during the first two
years of operation, and not all of Bruker's supplied pulse programs adhered
to the changed rules. Thus, some experiments simply did not work. The
program has powerful automation capability, but contains significant
omissions. In particular, no means is provided to automate VT work over a
range of more than a few degrees. No information has been provided about
operating procedures for the VT controller, and performing VT experiments
has required an experimental approach. Many other program functions either
do not work at all or do not work as described in the manual. This is
hardly surprising since the manual was four years out of date when supplied
and described an earlier version of the program running on a different
computer.
10) We have been using a JEOL LA 400 (Lambda series) NMR spectrometer for
over a year now. This is an instrument we bought from the mother company
in Japan, so I am not sure if this model is available in the US.
With regards to the hardware, we feel that this paticular model has
excellent hardware. In paticular, the VT controller has near-perfect
accuracy and reproducibility. I know because a visiting professor from
Chicago calibrated the VT unit and, when he compared it to the older
Brukers he was used to, deemed that the JEOL controller was excellent.
The software initially was very buggy, but a free upgrade (part of the
contract) gave us a much improved version. The user interface is very
much mouse-and-windows based, so it takes getting used to, specially for
older users who are used to typing in commands. Since the Japanese are
not very good at English, some menus and dialog boxes are grammatically
incorrect, and console messages are hard to understand. The documentation
is in not-very-good English, but we have been able to survive. These last
comments may not be true of software and manuals marketed by JEOL USA.
I would rate their service to be very good, as several visits have been
made to our site by company sales representatives and engineers to look
into our progress and upgrade the hardware (I think the Lambda series are
a new line, hence the frequent upgrading). (The language barrier can be a
bit of a frustration, though). They also did the first helium refill
(after commissioning) for us.
11) We presently own a JEOL which we will be glad to get rid of. The
computer is old (at least 10 yrs) and slow and very user unfriendly -
not good in an undergraduate teaching environment. Part of our
dissatisfaction comes from lack of networking capabilities,
difficulty of file management and lack of all the modern features
(gradients, etc) which JEOL now provides on their newer
spectrometers. This dissatisfaction is perhaps more a result of the
age of the instrument rather than the manufacturer, but nevertheless
we have lost enthusiam for JEOL. Moreover there is a general sense
that JEOL has been a follower, not a leader, in the NMR game, but
this may be nothing more than a stereotype. BTY, service has been a
mixed bag. Sometimes the help we get is very good - top notch.
Sometimes we feel we have been slighted on service.
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Dr. Alex "Kitt" Kitaygorodskiy Phone: 864-656-0611
Director, NMR Facility Fax: 864-656-6613
Chemistry Department kkitayg@clemson.edu
Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634-1905
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